Article March 26, 1990 Issue

Time better spent

A sense of order in our life can be one way of bearing witness to the order of divine Mind.

Donley Hotchkiss Johnson

Hide-and-seek is a great game, but at other times looking for something you need can be downright annoying. The answer is to keep things neater, of course. But in my teens I thought being neat was usually taken too far! Orderliness easily seemed to stifle spontaneity and creativity. Neatness was dull, and I had more important things to do than to be tidy. So almost every level surface in my room was covered with stacks of things. Taking time for "housekeeping" could keep me from having friends and adventures.

I had read about the order that Mrs. Eddy maintained in her house. She even kept pins of varying lengths in prescribed corners of her pincushion.^{See We Knew Mary Baker Eddy (Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1979), p. 201 .} At first I thought this was trivial. Yet I knew that Mrs. Eddy, whose prayers had healed people of tuberculosis, blindness, heart disease, was not a trivial person. I had great respect for her because of her discovery of Christian Science. So, although I wasn't orderly myself, I couldn't completely forget Mrs. Eddy's standard.

Then one day I was forced to play hide-and-seek for a valuable pen. I looked in the two drawers where a pen was likely to be. No pen. I looked in places where a pen was not likely to be. Still no pen. Then I thought, "I don't like to spend time looking for a pen! This isn't creative at all!" It occurred to me then that one reason Mrs. Eddy had a precise place for objects was that she had better things to do than to search for them!

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